The Tempest
by HayashiOkami
Summary: Original Persona Story. Someone is using people and the power of their Personas and Shadows in a social experiment to create the thesis of the century. But even after you know the truth, how can you stop the puppeteer from pulling your strings? A group of socially dysfunctional teenagers are about to find out.


**The Tempest**

Your friends, and the trust you place in those friends, are perhaps your greatest allies. More reliable and more resilient than any sword or shield, the bonds you create with others are precious memories that should never be forgotten or lost to time.

Ah…but what happens when you can no longer trust those friends? Human nature is fickle, envious, and selfish at heart. It is also filled with compassion, whimsical acts of selflessness, and beauty that can only be found in the finite. Sometimes we don't realize what we have until it is gone.

The cherry blossoms of spring are infinitely finite. Observe them, and you will discover why they are beautiful. But humans cannot be read like open books. What we are made of can be purchased for a measly sum, but pieced together cannot make a human being.

If Personae and Shadows exist, though, then perhaps the answer lies within their mystical powers.

What do you do when an entire community – your community – becomes the subject of one massively convoluted experiment, the thesis of a madman?

**Trial One**

**[April 7]**

This was nothing new. Watching the land flicker by, leaving one home for another, moving from the city to the suburbs, was nothing new. Nor was transferring to a new school, introducing himself before a nameless crowd that would forget him the second he left.

He had been too naïve and hopeful in believing that he would never have to do it again. In front of his parents he held his tongue and forced a supportive smile on his face, telling them than he didn't mind the move.

He shouldn't be bitter towards them, not when they had finally given a meaning to the word _family_ and made him realize that there were people who cared out there, and that they didn't have to be his birth parents to do that. Still, it took all his willpower not to whine like a petulant, spoiled child and demand a reason as to why he had to move when everything was going so well.

Well, that was wrong, too. His parents probably thought that it would help him clear his mind. If they moved, he wouldn't have to see those painful places anymore. He was just starting high school, so it wasn't like they would be uprooting him and transferring him to a different school. He wouldn't have to go through with those awkward introductions.

He didn't even have any friends in the city. None who would miss him, he was sure. It shouldn't have been a big deal. He was a veteran at moving, at adjusting to new environments and new people and pretending that none of it bothered him.

The car was pulling into a quiet suburban neighborhood. A few kids were playing in someone's front yard; in the distance a dog barked and birds fluttered overhead. It was a familiar scene. It could have belonged anywhere in his memories. He had never lived here, but had an idea as to what it would be like already.

The more he thought about it, the tighter he held the backpack in his arms. School started in a few days, so he had enough time to help his parents unpack before life settled into a comfortable routine. The one new aspect to this whole ordeal was the amount of belongings _he _had to unpack. When they had been boxing everything away for the movers to pick up, he had been amazed at the sheer amount of things his parents had bought him in the past year.

It made him feel a bit guilty whenever he silently complained to himself. It wasn't like he had anything in the city that made him want to stay. Whether or not he started a new school here or there was inconsequential; he was certain that the results would be the same.

His mother's excited voice stirred him from his thoughts. "Ah, here we are! You've never seen it outside of pictures before, have you, Asuka? You can get your own room now, instead of sharing with the office. I think the movers will be around tomorrow. Until then, you can sleep downstairs with us on the futons."

Asuka pushed himself up and peered out the window at the place he would soon call home. It was surrounded by the same low concrete wall that encircled all of the houses in the neighborhood. The small, gangly tree in the front yard had sprouted sparse green leaves. Otherwise, it looked like every other house he'd stayed in.

"It looks great." He pushed a smile to the forefront and shifted to undo his seatbelt. Setting his backpack atop the stack of futons in the seat next to him, he shoved all of his misgivings aside for the moment and relished in the fact that he now had so much more than he had ever hoped for. This time was different than all the others.

Now all he had to do was believe that it was true.

The car pulled into the narrow driveway on the side of the house. As he grasped the door handle prematurely, the engine shivered to a halt.

Asuka was just a normal boy entering his first year of high school. He had always yearned for a normal life and now he would finally have one. Yukio would have been happy for him, right? Yukio would have told him in that brash manner of his that he deserved it and should take full advantage of the situation. He would have told him to make friends, because he could never have enough of those, and to stop worrying about his parents buying him things he didn't need.

"Asuka, are you okay? Do you need to sit down for a bit? All of the big furniture should already be in the house, if you're not up to moving. Your father and I can take care of the stuff in the car. Don't worry about it." A light hand rested on his shoulder, just a brushing touch over his shirt that didn't startle him.

He hadn't realized that he'd been starting to tear up until he blinked and his vision blurred. With all of the activity involved in moving, it had been a while since he froze up like this. Perhaps it was the suburban town's subdued air that was already affecting him. More likely, it was just his tendency to relate every situation back to his best friend.

"No, I'll be fine," he protested weakly. "It's okay; I'll help. It's not much stuff today, anyway, right?"

Although he couldn't see her expression, he could feel his mother's worry focused on him as he brought a hand up to swipe at his eyes. This time he didn't bother fixing a smile to his face.

This was the one thing that he could never assure himself would be alright.

* * *

He ended up having to go through with the introductions anyway, although he did get to stay in his seat this time. Most of the students in class had been together through elementary and middle school, and any other "new" students the school might have had weren't in this homeroom. He guessed it was too much to ask to become invisible.

Some of the disinterested kids wandered off, while others lingered to catch snippets of the conversation he was having with some enthusiastic boy his age. He was leaning over his desk, smiling a smile that almost classified as a grin.

"You're new here, right? I've never seen you before." He heard someone chuckle and the boy shot whoever it was a glare. He wasn't about to escape this, so he complied and answered.

"I'm Nakajima Asuka. I used to go to school in the city." _And a ton of other places you've never heard of in your life,_ he thought wryly. "I just moved in over spring break."

"Mhm, we're pretty close to Tokyo out here. It's only an hour's drive, right? But it has to be way different to actually live there, huh? This is a lot different than the city," the boy chuckled. He seemed to like rambling, but at the end of it all he looked to Asuka for a response.

He shrugged helplessly and said, "Well, I didn't actually live in the city; I just went to school there. But I don't think it's that weird. I've lived in a lot of different places before. I never lived in Tokyo itself, but I've lived in other cities. It's not so different than here, just a bit more crowded."

"Oh, you move around a lot? Is it because of your parents' jobs?" the boy inquired, to which Asuka shuffled about uncomfortably. True, this time was due to his parents' jobs, but to his knowledge neither of them had ever moved far from the city. This was their first time living further than a half hour away from it. Meanwhile, Asuka couldn't even remember all the places he stayed in if he tried. And he never had tried memorizing them.

"Sort of," he finally replied. Before he could ask anything else, Asuka blurted, "What's your name? I didn't get it."

The boy blinked at the sudden twist in the conversation, but he wisely chose not to comment. Apparently he wasn't as airheaded as he appeared. "I'm Natsume. Natsume Seiichi," he said after a moment's pause. "It's nice to meet you, Nakajima-kun. I can call you that, right?"

"Sure," Asuka shrugged. He found that he did that often, but never around his parents. They could usually tell his discomfort just by the stiffness in his shoulders. Figuring he should respond to the boy's expectant gaze, he added, "I guess I'll call you Natsume-kun, too."

Natsume nodded, flashing him a brief smile before glancing at the clock that hung over the door in the front of the classroom. "Well, clubs won't start up for a bit, so there's no reason to stick around here unless you're in the Student Council. We can go home now. I live in town, though, so I guess I'll be heading in a different direction than you. I didn't see you coming to school, after all."

"Um, yeah," Asuka muttered, for lack of anything pertinent to say. Most of the important things had been unpacked already, but he still had to sort through his boxes and organize his room. Just thinking about it filled his stomach with butterflies.

He really shouldn't have been so excited over unpacking his belongings. Waving goodbye to Natsume, he grabbed his school bag and quickly made his way out of there before someone else stopped to talk to him.

His parents had yet to begin work, so they spent the day unpacking and sorting out everything around the house that couldn't wait to be done. Their new house was a mess at the moment; the few things they had unpacked were scattered messily across the surface of boxes or tables.

It was a bit different, even though he'd lived with the couple for a little over a year, to hear the words "Welcome home!" when he returned from school. It took him a moment to process the phrase and respond with a smile as he slipped off his shoes.

"How was your day?" his mother asked, emerging from the kitchen. Surprisingly, he could smell warm food cooking on the stove as he ventured further into the house. They'd been surviving off store-bought food and takeout; no one had been in the mood to cook lately after all that moving.

"It was good," he replied, because that was all one could ever really say about the first day of school without complaining about it. "It wasn't that awkward…Um…I met this boy in my class, too. He was a bit talkative. He lives in town, or something. He…kinda reminded me of Yukio."

He wondered why he seemed to attract those types of people. His best friend had been a nonstop chatterbox, too, but he made every effort to involve Asuka in the conversation despite it. Not that he really reciprocated much. And Yukio was just as comfortable talking to thin air as he was to Asuka.

His mother offered him a thin, wrinkled smile before she headed off to check the stove. He trailed behind her, fingers brushing against the pale, featureless wall.

"I know it must be hard, but please try to make some friends, Asuka," she spoke to him pointedly, not to be intrusive, he knew. Still, he receded back into the shadow of the hallway instinctively, as if to remove himself from the conversation before it could even start. "No one's saying that you have to forget him or that you _should_ forget him. But I would think that he'd want you to make other friends, am I right?"

"Yeah, I know…" Asuka mumbled. After lingering for a moment longer, he retreated up the staircase near the entryway and headed to his new room to unpack.

He had never actively tried to make friends before. Who knew how it would go?

* * *

**Author's Notes: **I probably shouldn't be allowed to write new stories anymore. But whatever. I've already worked with most of this cast in previous stories, so hopefully things will go a bit faster. I just recently started playing _Persona 3_ and _4, _after many years of pining over them.

If anyone bothers reading this, I have a few questions. Should the story follow P3 or P4 in terms of where/when Shadows appear? (The Dark Hour or something akin to the TV world) And should I torture myself by creating my own Personas? (The theme I would follow if I did this is Chinese mythology.)

I know the whole "new student" thing gets kinda old, but I wasn't about to change his entire back story to fit this story, so...hopefully it'll work out.

The entire cast is original, but there might be a few cameos from canon characters later on. And expect lots of psychology related stuff in this.


End file.
